The Live Chronicles: Ch. 9

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We make you scream "No Mas!" in Fight Night Round 3 over Xbox Live.

By Jonathan Miller

After absolutely obliterating the all-too-easy career mode of Fight Night Round 3, I was excited to take my game online via Xbox Live and smash some human face. We have had some pretty heated battles in the IGN office, including an editor tournament in which I lost in the semi-finals to the eventual champion, Ivan Sulic. But, we know the real competition for Fight Night lies in the throngs of fans that play 100 online fights a week and have painful gamertags like UrMurderer or DestroyUrFace.

Obviously, we IGN editors have a natural advantage against the gaming public. We get copies of the game earlier and, heck, we write about videogames for a living. But in a way, you have the greater advantage because you can focus on Fight Night and play a bazillion rounds while we have to write about a number of different games like Barbie Horse Adventures. Still, we're pros, and the IGN editors that play Fight Night all have winning records on Xbox Live.

If there's one thing that I learned during this Live Chronicles -- other than that gamers out there have gotten very good, very fast -- is that you have to turn your heads-up display on. I wrote the review and marveled at the graphics of Round 3 on the 360 and how HUD-less gameplay is a wonderful innovation. Throw that out the window online. If you want to know where you stand exactly during a fight against an opponent, then turn the HUD on. The best players on Xbox Live turn it on and so should you. Would I prefer the HUD to be turned off for everyone? Yeah. It's a better boxing game without it. But, as one kind gamer from Canada was kind to point out, the HUD is a necessary evil.

Online, this punch is unstoppable.

Against the kind Canuck, I played as Duran and he took Corrales. In the fifth round, I could have sworn I was not only winning the fight, but that I was winning big. He asked me if I was playing with the HUD and I said no. He asked me to guess our energy levels, and I said 60-40 in my favor. It was actually 70-30 in his favor. Here's why the HUD is huge. You can see when you have an adrenaline boost. You can see which punch locations cause the most damage. You can immediately see if you're winning. Is this a bit cheap? Sure, it's exactly what EA was trying to move away from to create a more instinctual fight. But online, you have to flip on that HUD.

Also, what is it with 12 year olds throwing impact punches? I must have fought three or four angst-ridden adolescents who only throw ridiculously slow impact punches. I parried 90 percent of them, sure, and a few times I was knocked down by a lucky stun punch. But seriously, kids, stop throwing those punches and wasting all of our time. I don't know how many first-round KOs I have because I parry your impact punch and answer with a flash K.O. Repeat three times. Game over.

Throughout this whole process, I compiled a 19-11 record, which is really 19-9 since PS2 editor Jeremy Dunham lost a fight on my gamertag, and I had to quit my first fight to change my controller settings. EA dropped the ball a bit by not including an option to forfeit a match without going against your online record, but it's really no big deal. Lag is a minor issue with FNR3, and all the more reason EA should have allowed us to forfeit without penalty. Occasionally the lag is just too much to handle. Most of the time it plays great, although I have been booted off the server about 10 times for unknown reasons.